A distraught Queens mom is said to be wracked with guilt yesterday over the accidental drowning a day earlier of her 2-year-old daughter – who wandered into their backyard pool thinking they were still playing hide-and-seek.

“It’s just a horrible tragedy,” Penny Annecco told The Post, tears welling in her eyes whenever she spoke of her little girl, Jolie.

Relatives said the mother was taking it especially hard, since she was the one watching the child.

Jolie was found drowned in her family’s aboveground pool Thursday morning in Ozone Park.

Her mother made the horrifying discovery, after believing the girl had been upstairs in the house changing her clothes.

The toddler had apparently gone into the 4-foot-deep pool to hide, thinking they were still playing.

“[Penny] didn’t even know she was outside,” said Fantauzzi. “She was looking for her in the closet, in her room. She looked on the deck and she wasn’t there. And she was already at the bottom of the pool.”

Fantauzzi said Annecco often put a life vest on the little girl and took her to splash around in the pool, so Jolie may have thought it was a safe place to hide.

“She thought she was unbeatable. She tried to find one spot to hide, and she thought it was a nice spot,” said Fantauzzi, who said Jolie used to call him “So-Big” because he used to weigh over 400 pounds.

“She was an independent little girl. She wanted to put on her own sneakers and her own clothes. She wanted to do everything by herself.”

When Annecco retrieved her daughter from the pool, she screamed for neighbor Steve Lancelot, a retired firefighter, who dashed across the street and tried for 10 minute to revive the girl, to no avail.

“Steve blames himself, but he did his best. There is no one to blame,” said Fantauzzi.

Annecco said the girl had a heart full of love and connected easily with others.

“She touched our lives in her two years. She certainly didn’t get to live long enough,” said the mother, who quit her job at a dentist’s office to raise the girl. “She loved birds and squirrels, adults and babies.”

Annecco added: “Maybe God needed an angel in heaven, because he took ours.”

Services for Jolie will be at the Romanelli and Son Funeral Home on Rockaway Boulevard.